Machines in Music is an expo of modular synth manufacturers that lasts two days. It takes place in Maspeth Queens. Which is in the edge of Bushwick Brooklyn. But basically in the middle of fucking nowhere.
There is no explicit focus on any one type of gear. But the majority of the stuff is Eurorack modular. With some patchable synths and other gear making an appearance.
The great thing about Machines in Music, is that for the most part, the guys who are presenting at the booths, are the guys who designed the synth modules. This is Dan Snazelle of the local company Snazzy FX. An excellent human being and funny as shit. He's demo-ing one of his new products, the Dual Multiplier. A four quadrant multiplier that sounds really really great. I bought a kit version of one, to solder together myself. Because I'm very into the whole SDIY thing.
We spent about 10 minutes just making pretty pictures on the scope with it. Weren't even listening to what that sounds like. Just making jaggy weird shapes. Fun times.
Critter and Guitari is another local company. They make mostly instruments like the Organelle and Chordovox. This time around they were showing off this new gadget for doing some video synthesis. A hot topic among modular and synthesis people. It's called the ETC. I'm a bit excited about it as it has HDMI output, not janky obsolete composite or SVideo as lot of the video synthesis products do these days. The guts are written in PYTHON. Which some folks say is a not too hard thing to grok. But I'm cool with PHP, SQL and Javascript. Python? Eh... Not enough time. The Organelle is similar, in that it's guts are written in Pure Data. With either box, the user can write their own patches, given they are technically astute enough.
Bastl had a bunch of stuff strewn on a table inside, with a sign telling folks to go outside. There was this really cool custom faceplate for their granpa module. I was sorely tempted to grab it. Was it for free? Lots of things at this event were for free. (I got a lot of stickers and pinbacks). I erred on the side of caution.
Mr Bastl (in the sweatshirt) and some guy.
Later that night was an excellent show. I only caught the first 3 acts. Hiro Kone was amazing.
SPSS was quite noisy, basically killed it. Very intense. I want to collaborate with this act.
Via App was very good, a little too house for my taste, but I'm an outlier in that regard. Crowd dug it.
